William S. Burroughs was one of those beatnik author types who made no sense. Though his works made no sense, that didn't stop plenty of those involved in the drug culture from taking lots of mind altering substances and claiming to understand what Mr. Burroughs was bullshitting about. Burroughs' book "Naked Lunch", which is supposedly the basis for this movie (though multiple reviews I've read have stated the movie is partially an adaptation of the book, but mostly a telling of Burroughs's own psychosomatic journey in creating said book) is probably your typical melting pot of beatnik coffeehouse jargon and Marxist rhetoric, but I wouldn't know since I've got a rare disease known as "Selective Illiteracy", meaning I only read things that are overwhelmingly captivating to me. I've read 4 books in the 3 years since graduating high school, those being "Have A Nice Day", "American Psycho", "Trainspotting" and "The Celestine Prophecies"... yes, two of those were made into two of my favorite movies, one was written by a professional wrestler and the other's one of those "new age" mind expanders that I usually snuff... go figure, must've been a woman involved in my choice to read that one...

So, like I was saying, I haven't read the book and it's not likely I ever will. I won't try to pick apart Burroughs, I'll never shoot up in an effort to get into the mind of Kafka, all because I do movies and that's all. With that said, My criticism of this flick will be just that: of this flick. If anyone has some information that can help others who give a damn in their own understanding of the movie and the book, feel free to send me a link to a webpage and I'll stick it up here somewhere, but personally I'm likely to ignore it. Why? As I've said numerous times before, this is a movie review site, by me, about my opinion and that's it. Having stated my power and fed my own ego for the time being, allow me to continue...

When you think a movie about drug-induced hallucinations, who would you peg for the director that could best capture the purest meaning of confusion and false reality? No, darker than Terry Gilliam... no, more Canadian than David Lynch, though you've got it half right... Ah, David Cronenberg! There ya go! Yep, Mr. David "Scanners, Dead Ringers, Videodrome" Cronenberg takes the chores of bringing Burroughs to life (from beyond the grave!), with a cast the likes of Peter "Robocop" Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holmes and Julian "Warlock" Sands. A pretty impressive gathering to say the least. Well, more about these guys later, right now, let's get to the sodomy of our gray matter...

Our tale unfolds in the wacky days of the 1950s, more specifically in the crossroads of humanity known as New York City. In the post-war era, when some of the most artistic minds of the time were shooting up on heroin, smoking opium and questioning the actions of their "elected" government. One such mind, William Lee (Peter Weller in a characterized representation of Burroughs), has decided to give up on the 'H' and get a respectable life for himself as one of New York's finest (exterminators of creepy crawlies that is). However, when he comes up short on bug powder in the middle of a job, his boss shows his dislike of the news ("You want I should spit at our face?!") and sends Bill home. After a short coffeehouse break with a couple of his amigos/fellow head trippers, Billy goes home to find his wife Joan (Judy Davis) injecting a vial of watered down roach powder into her tit... well, at least now he knows where his supply's been disappearing to...

According to Joan, she and Billy's two pals decided to juice on the powder under the pretense of a "literary high", calling it "Kafkaesque" because it makes them feel like a bug... Godz damned hippy trash and their adjective and metaphors and sentence enhancers... Anyway, proof that it's impossible not to be a junky when you're still hanging out with them, Billy gives in to Joan's childish head games of "you suck since you stopped shooting up" and boils himself a spoonful of Raid™ for a little wedded bliss. You think that's bad, wait till they have kids. My parents needed all kinds of narcotics to last through me and my sister... To further expose how his life sucks now that it's "better", Billy's workday is interrupted when the local narc officers round him up for possession of a controlled substance... two things: A) how can exterminator powder be considered a "controlled substance" and; B) shouldn't they be talking to Billy's boss about supplying our hero with said substance?!

Now, I can't tell if the brain sodomy starts here or if it started prior to the arrest, but either way Bill is taken to an interrogation room and grilled about his bug powder as to it's insecticide properties. Why is Billy getting crap? The fuzz knows about his past with the liquid brown sugar, so they're not all that sure this bug powder isn't a new flavor of 'H' (now in Mango-Kiwi Explosion!). To test Lee's claims (again, as opposed to questioning the boss who supplies him with the junk), the cops lock him in the room with a table full of the junk and one VERY big cockroach. After they leave, Billy learns this isn't your average roach (aside from the fact it's bigger than a football?!), cuz this guy's got a big inflamed anus in his thorax... that talks! Buckle up kids, there's very little that will make sense from here on out and it just gets worse the longer it goes, like the proverbial snowball down the mountain...

The bug (or more precisely it's ass) blabs on about some kind of agency, some place called "Interzone" and some mission for Billy that requires him to assassinate his wife Joan and make it look like an accident. Agent Lee's reaction? He disposes of the beast the old fashioned way (with loafer-fu!), busts out of the police station and goes fugitive! I wonder if it's too late to plead insanity... I mean for me, not Billy... Cronenberg and Burroughs, not just a bad name for a Vaudeville act, but a recipe for a 2 hour double-penetration of your brain stem. In order to put the recent events behind himself and get off the powder before he gets seriously fucked over by it, Billy Boy goes to see Dr. Benway, who specializes in getting exterminators off their office supply addictions. Benway gives Mr. Lee some ground up centipede meat, tells him to mix it in with his "friend's" bug powder on a gradually increased basis until he no longer feels the appeal of the roachicide and gives it up under his own indifference. Supposedly the bug meat causes a chemical reaction that shuts down the part of the brain that the exterminant stimulates, hence the lost of interest. Yes, it's a natural "alternative cure" to a man-made "disease", the moments hippy "medicine men" live for. Returning home from his visit with the physician, our protagonist walks in to find his wife with her legs spread, buried underneath their lumpy friend Hank... or Martin... I don't know, they're both hemorrhoids, let's just say Joan was gettin' plowed by one while the other guy sat there reading senseless psycho-babble.

The noir head trip turns fatal though, when Bill convinces Joan to do their "William Tell routine", in which she places a glass on top of her head and he plays the titular role with a handgun... Ladies, if your man's been acting borderline insane and walks in on you taking his friend's flagpole with a grin on your drug addled lips, don't offer to put a drinking glass on your head while he tries to shoot it off with a pistol, or you'll end up with a serious leakage of brain juice from the speed hole in your face... just like Joan. After doing the dirty deed, Bill does what any newly widower would: heads to a gay bar down by the pier to pick up young immigrant boys! Whilst knocking back a couple mugs of intoxicating amber piss drink, he's approached by a limp-wristed Cabana Boy by the name of Kiki, who inquires as to Mr. Lee's sexual orientation... basically, he flat out asks, "are you a faggot?"... I agree with Homer Simpson, in that they can't keep stealing "our" words for "them"! Those are "our" words! How can we harass and slander and verbally rape others if they're using our hate words and hate phrases?! Okay, so I don't make a convincing bigot, in that I'm too well educated and hate everyone equally, so I'll cut it out. Though Billy denies his meat lovin' side (but not completely ruling it out in light of recent events...), Kiki introduces the hero to one of his special friends: Mugwump. "What the fuck's a 'Mugwump'?" you're probably asking, and if you'd shut your word hole for a minute and lay off the speed, I'd tell you.

A Mugwump is, well, uhm, to be honest, I'm going to have to front this one back to Homer Simpson, my instant bail-out. Homer? "Well, it's not quite a mop, and it's not quite a puppet, but man... so to answer your question, I don't know". Thanx Homer, you're 30lbs. of idiot in a 10lb. bag... The best I can put it, would be to say that a Muggy is like a big, naked, skinny humanoid creature than's perpetually hunched over and look kinda like a wrinkled "Communion" alien with jizz pipes sticking out of it's dome. They also speak in riddles with accents usually reserved for old Jews. This particular 'Wump claims to be another contact agent of Bill's, like the football roach in the pig factory. After getting a short extermination report on the Joan mission, Muggy passes more info on to Bill about his duty to type up a thorough, official report of his superiors (?) along with travel arrangements for a little trip to the den of iniquity known as Interzone, where drug addicts, con artists and pedophiles the world over come to converge in their sins. In the 'Zone, Bill is found mashing away at his big clunky typewriter in the '50s equivalent to "cyber cafes", when a local drug kingpin by the name of Hans (it just gets more and more homoerotic people, open up your tolerance ports and "expand your minds") introduces himself and drops the name of Dr. Benway. Hans "mistakes" Bill for a middle man to whom he's supposed to give a supply of black centipede grindings to deliver to Benway upon return to the states... the plot thickens... in a plot that's already harder to wade through than a hot tub full of molasses and Krazy Glue™... I really think I need drugs right now... just a little to make something here make sense!

Back in his hotel room, Bill shoots up on some centipede powder, which leads to his typewriter growing mandibles, antenna, legs, wings and one of those vocal anuses bug apparently have but I never knew about... that, or Bill's got some kind of subconscious asshole fixation... which would explain why this big hallucination he's having also tends to include a LOT of man love material... Speaking of which, the typebeetle (or is that "bugwriter"?) tries to convince Bill that, as an "agent", his best cover in Interzone is that of a homosexual... I think that bug's just being kinky... probably always wanted to watch Robocop engage in dirty, sweaty man love with strapping young Interzone boys... "furthering the company cause" my ass... or rather, NOT my ass... Anyway, back at the typing cafe, Bill meets up with Hans once more, who introduces him to Kiki (who I thought had originally introduced Bill to Mugwump, but then I guess all these little Interzone meat smokers look the same to me...). Kiki then introduces Bill to Tom (Ian Holm!) and Joan (Judy Davis again) Frost: an American couple who specialize in writing science fiction and having extramarital love sandwich sessions with the local veal, i.e. the boy whores, not actually baby cows, you sick little freaks. Engaging in conversation with Tom, it seems that Mr. Frost can somehow communicate with Bill telepathically about his own efforts to slowly kill his wife Joan (yes, both their wives are named Joan, both are played by the same actress and both are either murdered or scheduled for murdering), all the while letting on as if he's also carrying on a verbal convo with him. What's this mean? Tom's lips don't match his words, making for a surreal case of Godzilla Lip. You know, typical guy talk about killing their loved ones and talking to their typewriters...

While vomiting in a nearby alley (possibly from carrying a telepathic conversation?), Bill is next picked up by a Mr. Yves Cloquet (pronounced "Eve Clow-kaye"), a friend of the Frost and played by one of my favorite Limeys, Julian Sands! He's one of the few guys I can admit to being attractive... stop trying to touch my penis, it's not like that... Bill's new buddy takes him out for breakfast and they trade queer anecdotes and overly dramatized gay hippy psychobabble diatribes about a drag queen named Bobo with explosive hemorrhoids... But, when Yves tries to bring Mr. Lee back home with him, Bill's not ready to explore the final frontier just yet and heads home, ignoring the unwritten male code that says buying someone a meal equals at least a bj. Meeting back up with Tom Frost, Bill winds up taking Tom's typewriter home with him under Tom's insistence that it's a superior machine/insectoid office equipment. Dosing on some more centipede, Bill goes schizo, typing his innermost thoughts and confusions on BOTH machines. Not a big deal at first, things turn ugly when his bug dictation device jumps Tom's intruding 'writer, tearing it to pieces and leaving it a mangled mess of exoskeleton, bug meat and typewriter debris! WHAT THE FUCK?!!?! I NEVER KNEW TYPEWRITERS WERE SO DAMN TERRITORIAL! That's it, I need an angel dust-Mountain Dew cocktail if I'm going to go ANY further into brain freak land...

Having proved it's rule of the nightstand, Bill's roachwriter proceeds to fill his owner in on the next leg of his mission: seduce Joan Frost, steal HER report from their lodgings and submit it to HIS superiors. Joan invites Bill in with no hesitation, and after a bit of centipede jelly 'tween their cheeks and gums, the two are soon writing their own Arabic literotica on Joan's freakish 3rd typewriter creature (which looks very H.R. Gigerian). Joan then submits to the wily mojo of Peter Weller and they're rolling in the hay with Joan's 'writer (and it's tight, shining ass), until the Frosts' housekeeper Fadela interferes with her riding crop, sending the naked bug machine headfirst off the balcony, shattering it on the cobblestones below... I get that irritating Eraserhead feeling on the back of my forebrain again... but then, what did I expect from a drug-noir-bug flick by David Cronenberg?! Yikes. Anyway, Tom soon returns to find his Arabic bugwriter busted and discovers what happened to the one he loaned Bill too, pissing him off royally and forcing him to kidnap Bill's machine at gunpoint... whatever, just keep walking... So, without his bugwriter to influence him, Bill drifts back into reality, where his two lunkhead pals Hank and Martin have been trying to get Bill's latest work "Naked Lunch" published... it's true what Bradley Nowell said, heroin really DOES increase your creativity! Convinced that THIS is the hallucination and Interzone is the reality, Bill introduces his friends to his centipede shooter cocktail. Being the junkies they are they're all for it, and Bills soon on a bus back to Interzone... a heroin bus...

Upon his return to the 'Zone, Bill gathers up the shattered pieces of Tom's typewriter and takes them to an Interzone blacksmith, has them melted down and reformed into a less insectile typing machine that looks an awful lot like a Mugwump head... because it is a Mugwump head, and the teeth are the keys... The head further informs Mr. Lee that the evil corporation Interzone Inc. is behind the manufacturing of the super addictive centipede drug, and is under the control a certain Dr. Benway. Though Bill doesn't remember the guy, we all know it's Roy Scheider, just to confirm any second thoughts you might've been having. To get closer to the doc, Billy has to give in to his man lovin' side and get intimate with Kiki. Having conquered the local favorite amongst the pedophile populace, Bill gets closer to Yves through his new boy bitch. And who wouldn't want to get close to Yves, he's the "Swiss dandy" and he's got a "wonderful car"! Light conversation ensues, and if you're ever hanging out with Peter Weller and he asks if you've heard the story about the man who spoke out of his asshole, just nod and slowly back away... The convo with Yves leads to more info about Interzone Inc. and the Frosts' maid Fadela as being the lover of one Dr. Benway. In exchange for the info though, Bill loses his faithful Cabana Boy, Kiki, who winds up trapped in a big bird cage and gets his ass pounded and his brain eaten by Cloquet, who reveals himself to be, yep, you guessed it, a big bug... perhaps an Earwig or Silverfish... If you're afraid of creepy crawlies, don't even pick this movie up, just go selectively blind and keep strollin.

After escaping the sexual booby trap set for him by the Muggy 'writer, Bill hands it over to Tom for the return of his trusty old bug machine. Tom accommodates the offer and everything seems to be getting closer to an ending here. The tortured and beaten bug points Bill toward Hans's drug factory, saying that he'll find Joan and Benway there, including his "penetration point", Fadela... I hope no one ever tells me that freaky old broad is my "penetration point"... At the drug factory things get, you guessed it, MORE fucked up, as the centipede operation has been changed into a Mugwump jizz slurping den, Fadela is actually revealed to be Benway in HEAVY make-up, and the drag queen mastermind offers Bill a position in his narcotics trafficking operations as an inside man to the US connections... I'm guessing he accepts with Joan as payment, cuz before you can say "what the fuck just happened here?", Bill and Joan are at the customs check for the nation of Annexia. To prove that his declared occupation of "writer" is legit, Bill then pulls the William Tell bit on this Joan too, shooting her dead also... which is apparently enough to prove his writing credentials, as the border guards wave them into Annexia... and the end credits... THANK ZOMBIE FUCKING CHRIST ON A POGO STICK!

This was bona-fide madness. Not since Eraserhead have I been so in question of my own sanity. Even Lost Highway made more sense than this, and THAT movie left me drooling and scratching my head for the 2 days following! David Cronenberg doesn't HAVE to be a psychotic mind fucker, so why does he feel the need to do so now?! I loved Scanners, I enjoyed The Fly immensely, The Brood, Dead Ringers, and Videodrome were all great (or so I've heard...), so why did he feel the need to alienate and confuse me with Naked Lunch?! I mean, there's this amazing cast, including Ian Holm, Julian Sands, etcetera, etcetera, who all put in stellar performances, especially Weller whose deadpan demeanor makes him a perfect noir hero. And what does Cronenberg do with all of this? He stabs me in the brainpan! It's like going to a party where everyone gets drunk and reminisce about the last time they all got drunk. Everyone's having a grand old time because they're in on the topic while you're just stuck with a screwdriver in your hand and blood all over your shoes...

It's the penultimate example of a movie you spend $3 to rent, then $500 on a college course that attempts to explain it to you. Whereas I'm sure it'd make more sense if I read Kafka and Burroughs, sat down to compare the source materials and the people behind them, and took a good 3 weeks to wrack my brain inside an abandoned hermit cave somewhere to write a 40 page thesis-type review on the whole ordeal, I'm just not that kind of guy. I don't care about the books, I don't care about the people, all I care about is the movie and the movie confused the shit outta me. Not to say it didn't look good, it wasn't well acted or it didn't intrigue me, just that I don't like having my brain raped without my consent. Cronenberg? 'No' means 'no', and don't you forget it, otherwise next time I'll press charges!